Does this imply a gloomy long term outlook for engineers in other companies who do platform and infrastructure development? Are there any leading indicators of this trend?
Once the applications grow big, the need for infrastructure people comes back. The difference is now these people are not touching hardware but software.
Correspondingly, you need far fewer engineers in your company to build and maintain custom software for such things. I am wondering whether in medium term - say the next 4 to 5 years - we are going to see an order of magnitude decrease in the number of jobs in this sector.
I don't think we need less people, I think we need people to work differently. Also, an application needing of X amount of infrastructure persons will now need less than that, which frees resources to deploy more applications.
In a nutshell, I don't think we're going to lose jobs at all. I think the cloud is a fundamental pillar of the startup system, which is creating so many jobs that didn't exist before. Efficiency doesn't drive us to less jobs - it drives us to more jobs.